The Domino Diaries (16 page)

In New York people had arguments with their horns; in Havana they had operas. As the man progressed to the center of the intersection, still in the middle of the street with the cars patiently waiting for him to pass, I noticed there was a rope attached to his ankle tied to something that remained offstage behind a lamppost. I reached into my breast pocket and took out a cigarette, waiting with my match until I saw what he was dragging: a truck's tire.

Maybe everybody was too busy to notice because, like every other day in Havana, it's Valentine's Day year round. You can't walk anywhere without somebody blowing kisses or whistling or hissing at somebody. If this were the States it would be a sexual harassment lawyer's wet dream. Yet hardly anybody seems to mind. Cupid was supposed to be a screwed-up kid settling scores with grownups anyway, so it makes sense he'd be mistaken for a local patron saint in this place.

I made my last walk home as I always did, with the sunset glinting off American hubcaps and putting the finishing touches on a stickball game played down an alley, with everyone pleading for just one more out. The sunset got its hooks into the whole overwhelming dripping-wet painting of everything in Havana, and I turned over the same thought I had from the beginning: maybe Cuba is just one dictator's heartbeat away from becoming like everywhere else. But what if it's not? How long could this possibly last? How long
should
it last? It's a lot easier to theorize about human behavior than it is to look at it.

*   *   *

In the darkness Jes
ú
s lit a match and we started down thirteen flights of stairs inside his parents' apartment complex's barren stairwell. The elevator had been broken for years and the power had gone out an hour before we arrived. We kept passing whole families sullenly panting up the stairs toward home. They gasped their hellos.

“The opening first pitch is only a few minutes away.” Jes
ú
s laughed. “We have to hurry!”

We'd spent twenty minutes with Jes
ú
s's clandestinely dying father and mom in their apartment. Jes
ú
s massaged his mother's feet while pleading for stories from his father about heroic team feats at ball games they'd attended through the years. “Did you bring me any cigars?” the father asked his son.

Jes
ú
s handed over three from his breast pocket and offered a match as his father bit off and chewed the end of a cigar. Halfway through each feat detailed in the story the cigar went out and Jes
ú
s had to light another match for his father.

“So.” His father grinned at me devilishly. “My son's entire life he's offered me this service. Don't think I raised him to be my slave. You can ask my wife, I lost my mind when I saw this boy's face for the first time and I never got it back. He still convinces me I invented for all the world the pleasure of having a son.”

“Then you should come with us to watch the game.” Jes
ú
s kissed his cheek.

“I'm a little tired, Jesusito. Another time we'll go.”

“This man never missed a baseball game I played in my entire life.” Jes
ú
s laughed. “Not a stickball game or a pickup game in the park. Never.”

“I told him already.” He slapped his cheek gently. “I was a slave to this boy. Now go enjoy the game while I take a nap with my queen and our ugly-as-sin dogs.”

Right then we all heard the roar of air raid sirens coming from Latinoamericano's ballpark.

“
Vamos, ¡Jesusito! Venga.
I don't care how poor my country is, if you catch a foul ball you keep it and bring it home to me.”

When we finally got outside bicycle spokes whirred by as boys accompanied their girlfriends or younger siblings to the ballpark. Hitchhiking families crammed into wheezing jalopies or whining Ladas for the stadium. While I was evaluating again the old man's choice to keep his illness from his son, Jes
ú
s clapped my shoulder. “You know what El Duque told the Americans when they asked him if he was nervous about pitching at Yankee Stadium?”

“What did he say?” I smiled with relief.

“He said how could anyone be nervous about Yankee Stadium after pitching at Latinoamericano. That's what he said
after
he'd left. This experience is going to ruin the rest of sports for all your life. It is going to molest you like a priest! Baseball is the highest religion in my country.”

We joined the immense crowd marching its way into the entrance, liquor and cigars in hand. Latinoamericano could hold over fifty thousand fans and there was not a parking lot in sight. After we paid two Cuban pesos (about ten cents) for our seats, a vendor pushed two raffle tickets toward us from a barred window as if they were crack pipes. “Good seats?” I asked.

“No designated seats inside.” Jes
ú
s laughed. “No luxury boxes. No commercial breaks. You'll see.”

Before we'd gotten inside another clap sounded: tin cans being smashed together, echoing throughout the stadium. A drum started pounding and thousands more people clapped behind its thud. Another siren wailed. We crammed through a narrow tunnel with hundreds all around us and then the expanse of the diamond and outfield unfolded before us, sprinkled with that immaculate constellation of ballplayers and their mitts standing under several furiously burning lights extended by concrete at the angle of fire engine cranes toward a burning building. A three-story logo of Industriales dimly shone from the side of a blue-painted building just beyond the outfield. A ribbon of camouflage green uniforms circumnavigated the crowd where the military had been called out in case anything beyond the usual rioting occurred. As we found our seats behind the reserved government seating, the beat of the drum reached a crescendo and three well-built teenage girls in spandex turned their backs to the field and stuck their asses out to twerk with abandon. Those around them laughed and hollered approval.

“You see that man?” Jes
ú
s asked as he raided a tray of peanuts from a vendor. “The only one out of uniform, in the opposing team's dugout?”

“Yeah.”

“Does his profile look familiar?” Jes
ú
s laughed.

“No,” I confessed. “I have no idea who he is.”

“Their team doctor is Fidel's son.”

“
Him?
”

“Oh yes.” Jes
ú
s giggled. “None of Fidel's children followed him into politics. I wonder why that is? None of them wanted anything to do with this mess confronting the United States.”

At that point I gave up entirely on trying to follow the game in front of us.

“How hard is it for you to stay here, Jes
ú
s?”

“Some of these athletes, when they first got to Florida, did things that amused Americans.” Jes
ú
s smiled, cracking open some peanuts. “They bought dog food for their children because they saw a child smiling on the can and had no idea there was special food just for dogs or cats. Some fainted the moment they walked into an American supermarket. Some kept million-dollar checks in their back pocket for days because they didn't understand anything about banks.”

“You've never been away from Cuba?”

“I left with a delegation of engineers to Toronto once. For a week.”

“Was it what you expected?”

“Is Havana what
you
expected? I was born the same year as the triumph of the revolution. My father was always so proud of this. What he risked his life for in so many ways came true. For the first time since Columbus we were in control of our own destiny. Extreme poverty does not exist. Have you seen any homeless on our streets? I saw many homeless in a rich city like Toronto…”

“I'm waiting for the
but
.”

“The
but
is two very precious things. My father and my son. Two very powerfully opposing forces in my life, Brinicito. My father was able to provide me a better life than he enjoyed in so many ways. Can I offer that to my own son here in today's Cuba?” And then Jes
ú
s took a deep breath and concluded the topic the way I'd hear so many fathers sum up the calamity of their albatross. “The greatest joy any Cuban man can know is becoming a father, and our deepest anguish, no matter how hard we try, is not being able to provide for them here. I have never told my father this, but I send in our family's names to the lottery each year.”

“What
lottery
?”

“Every year the United States lets twenty thousand of us enter through a lottery to avoid the rafts that leave. All those horrible deaths from the
balseros
or smugglers' boats. It's all so
feo
. So each year I send in a letter with our names. And if they ever select us I will have to live with the betrayal of my father, which I don't know how I will ever do. He might never forgive me. But the alternative is betraying my son. And that is something I could never forgive
myself
for.”

Someone from Industriales hit a home run and everybody in the stadium but us jumped to their feet to see how far it would go.

 

13

SAND CASTLES

I had nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion.

—Jack Kerouac,
On the Road

A
S THE PLANE MADE
its final descent and sunk beneath the clouds, the first lights I could discern coming from Toronto were bank insignias atop skyscrapers. There was relief in being home, trading in the hysteria of communism for the perversion of capitalism. Exchanging the uncertainty of questioning everything that happened, was happening, and
would
happen in Cuba for where I came from, where people could accept the world blowing up sooner than any real change to the status quo.

Cuba had Jos
é
Mart
í
, Che, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Fidel on their culture's Mount Rushmore. It's exhausting sizing those people up. My culture's Mount Rushmore growing up was seemingly carved by Andy Warhol: Britney Spears (sexpot masquerading as a virgin), Michael Jackson (the strangest man on earth as most successful mainstream star ever), Hulk Hogan (fake athlete in a fake sport and the Make-A-Wish Foundation's number-one-requested celebrity for dying kids ahead of Michael Jackson and Mickey Mouse), O. J. Simpson (the fifth estate's wet dream), Lance Armstrong (Cancer Jesus selling his inspirational lie while raising half a billion dollars in cancer research), and Mike Tyson (our favorite world-class victim posing as victimizer). How many Cubans had I met ashamed of not being able to live their culture's broken dream? The culture I came from was constitutionally incapable of shame.

The French Canadian plumber sitting next to me on the flight home spent three hours, uninterrupted, detailing how he got over his divorce by regularly flying to Cuba to binge drink, fuck, and “look after” a series of eighteen-year-old girls—with their family's full support after being paid off—until one got pregnant and he could
safely
marry her off the island and have her to himself back home. He looked like the bloated, heartbroken Kerouac from his famous William F. Buckley interview.

“None of this bullshit back
here
with women,” he continued. “
Tabernak!
Our way of life is fucked up. All the pressure to have enough to offer a girl to get married until you do, and then everything around you, day after day, conspires to get you divorced. You're suspect if you aren't married and once you get married you can't seem to find anybody married who is happy. Your wife blames you for everything and she takes everything. Fuck that. I threw away half my life on that scam. You're young but you could learn a lot from me. It's why our society is so scared of prostitution. The institution of marriage is far less honest a transaction than spending a couple hours with a whore when you feel lonely.”

It's not hard to identify the people who fall for the kind of beauty that subtracts rather than adds something to their lives.

When I got back home from Havana my father had something terribly wrong with him. He'd been collapsing to the ground again and again with mysterious “attacks.” Nobody knew what it was and he refused to do anything to find out. Because of a real estate crash he'd battled a mountain of debt throughout my childhood. We all knew how much he smoked and drank every day. But like all highly functioning addicts, it had always felt like a tease. No smoker's cough or hangovers. Like so much between my father and me, everything hid in plain sight. How much does the line between privacy and secrets really matter if the only secrets you keep from people are the ones everybody already knows? He'd drink daily and I was resigned to the fact that he'd never stop, but then he'd never officially
started
in the first place. His alcoholism was always treated as a kind of tourism of the place where
real
drunks doing damage to their loved ones lived. The self-destruction he carried out without obvious consequences gave him a strange power over his own life and mine.

That's why for so long it was okay when I went to get fruit with him at the market as a child and he ducked off to the liquor store, leaving me a twenty to pay for the groceries. We both pretended to ignore the brown bag inserted into the plastic grocery bags: his crudely conspicuous sleight of hand. We both pretended to ignore my role as witness to his ritual. We ignored how his shame of my witnessing this spiked the punch bowl of his process. We
couldn't
ignore how much fruit went rotten by neglect in his house. But nobody launched any inquiries into why. We just always had another reason to get more. And then more. And more.